The age in which Plutarch was educated and in which he wrote his _Ethica_ is, from the literary point of view, closely similar to the so-called ‘Augustan’ age of English writing. Of all the periods of English style and thought, he would probably have found himself most at home in that of Pope, Addison, and Steele, or in its continuation with Goldsmith and Johnson. He flourished at a time when intellectual interests were remarkably keen, if not very profound; when literature, if for the most part it ventured on no high imaginative flights, did at least aim at some practical bearing upon the conduct of life; when men found entertainment, and probably some measure of moral or social help, in the readable essay or the friendly epistle; when facts, merely as such, were accepted as interesting if interestingly set forth; and when Philosophy, if she deigned to keep her feet upon the ground and to speak as one of the mortals, met with a due welcome from either sex. An eighteenth-century Plutarch might conceivably have written the moral papers of Johnson without Johnson’s ponderousness, or have contributed to the _Spectator_ papers more full than Addison’s of those ‘ideas’ in which Matthew Arnold found that writer so deficient. He might have written, though in a prose form, the _Essay on Man_, being meanwhile as willing as Pope to owe the bulk of his matter to other minds, but not so willing as Pope to play the expositor without first playing the earnest and critical student. Plutarch did not, so far as we are aware, try his hand at verse. To judge by his comments upon poetic duty and by his quotations—which are regularly taken from the best writers of a classical age already far remote—his conception of the poetic office was too exalted to permit of his dabbling in that domain. Had he done so, and had he followed the fashion of his times, he would perhaps have come nearer to our ‘Augustans’ even than in his prose. In poetry it was the age of description, reflection, satire, and moralizing, in the highest degree sensible, studiously informed with ‘wit’—in the broader Queen Anne sense of that word—and characterized by extreme deftness of pointed and quotable phrase, but in no sense creative, imaginative, or inspired. Its ideal contents consisted of ‘what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed’. The attitudes of both prose-writer and poet belonged to the intellectual and aesthetic spirit of the period, and so far as that spirit finds an individual embodiment in the Greek half of the Roman Empire, it finds him in Plutarch of Chaeronea.